pushpamala n. & clare arani

NATIVE WOMEN OF SOUTH INDIA
Manners & Customs
3 -17 Sept

In 19th c India , there were 'Zenana' or all women's studios in cities like Hyderabad and Kolkata run by British female photographers where women in purdah would get themselves photographed. "Native Women of South India", is a performative work where we - Pushpamala, a South Indian artist and Clare Arni, a British photographer who has grown up in South India - one black, one white - play the protagonists in a project exploring the history of photography as a tool of ethnographic documentation. The series of photographs presents an eccentric array of 'native types' by recreating characters from familiar or historical sources, ranging from the religious to mythological to the fictional, to the real. The project ironically comments on the colonial obsession with classification as well as the Indian nationalist ideal of "Unity in Diversity"- the notion of looking at ourselves as diverse peoples making up the nation- using performance and masquerade borrowed from the popular forms we see all around us, in the "costumes of India" pageants, Republic Day floats, festival tableaux and dioramas and in the dream projections of roadside studio photography.
The artifice of the posed studio photograph, with its elaborately created sets and costumes, becomes a site for fantasy to look at representations of South Indian women in the Indian imagination. The earliest image is from a 16c Deccani miniature painting of a "Yogini", a mythical sorceress who traps unwary travellers with her spirit medium, the pond heron- while the most recent one is from a 2002 newspaper photograph of two arrested chainsnatchers holding up police name slates. Playing with the notions of subject and object, the photographer and the photographed, white and black, real and fake, the images subvert and overturn each other in baroque excess…

Credits:
Concept and Direction: Pushpamala N and Clare Arni
Photography: Clare Arni
Production and Design: Pushpamala N
Performance: Pushpamala N with Clare Arni, Sudhindra Seshadri,
Shreelata Rao Seshadri, Tripura Kashyap, Vasudev and Mudra Sharma.

Artist Centre, Ador House, 1st Floor, Rampart Row, Mumbai 400 023. Tel.: 2284 5939

Gallery Chemould, Jehangir Art Gallery, 1st Floor, Mumbai 400 023. Telephone [022] 2284 4356
Email: art@gallerychemould.com